“Lord, the sea is so great, and my boat is so small.”
Why a sea so great and a boat so small is not mine to fathom. The art of sailing is mine to understand and practice as well as I am able. Three questions have guided my reflection: How did I get started as a theologian? What have been my intentions? What has happened along the way? The last of these questions opens up to the future.
External environment—events and people—does not determine us, but it does present the menu from which we select, and since this menu is the only one available, it shapes us. We are what we select, both literally and figuratively. As the years have gone by, I have become more aware of how important the offerings of the first three decades of my life have been for me.
I grew up in the kind of frontier setting that was Denver in the ’30s and the ’40s, in a family that migrated into the middle class during World War II and its aftermath and that enjoyed a Lutheran church life that was suited to all of that—frontier, working class, and upward mobility. My trajectory is my family’s, in that the family prepared me for it, totally supported me on the pathway, and takes pride in it. I am the product of an era and a social-class group for whom America’s Dream not only worked, but was liberating for at least a quarter-century. This statement is both literally true and thoroughly ironic. By the time I was twenty-one I was aware of the ambiguity of America and its Dream.
I count my first twenty-nine years as an apprentice period, at the end of which, within a three-month period, ordination ushered me into the church’s formal ministry and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago earned me a teaching position with that formal ministry at Hamma Divinity School, a seminary of the United Lutheran Church in America. My apprenticeship took me to only a few places—all of them important to me—Denver, eastern Nebraska for college, southern Colorado and Albuquerque, New Mexico for ministerial work, study at Tübingen in Germany and travels in western Europe for a year, and Chicago for seminary and graduate school. I have lived in the same ten-block-square area of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood for most of my life.
These first three decades enabled me to internalize a set of values that are woven into the fabric of my theological work. School and family set a tone for intellectual excellence and pluralism of persons and ideas.
East Denver High School was an elite school by any standard. Its graduates in the late ’40s and early ’50s received more scholarship money to Ivy League colleges than any other high school in the country, and one very British English teacher was hired to devote most of his time to coaching us on how to apply and interview for elite colleges (“. . . shoes shined, fingernails clean, walk directly toward the interviewer, look him in the eye, smile and extend your hand . . .”). The peer group was sensational. The student body was naturally integrated in almost equal parts: Blacks, Jews, and WASPs. My close peers were well-to-do and bright, and ended up going to those elite colleges. The bourgeoisie were there, but also John Achibold, who went into local politics, a sort of lesser Newt Gingrich of the time; John Dornberg, a Jewish refugee from Hitler, who was a socialist-communist, and became a prominent left-wing journalist; Martin Needler, a quick-witted British boy, who went on to become a social scientist of some repute. The group included the late George (“Ed”) Riddick, an African American social activist. Later, we were together in Hyde Park, where he was a graduate student and, as director of research, a member of Jesse Jackson’s staff in Operation Breadbasket and Operation PUSH.
Libertarians, social reformers, and power people—taking politics and societal issues very earnestly in our conversations. I did not seriously entertain becoming any of these things, since I was “going to be a minister,” but the upshot is that I knew about them and took such people for granted as a part of ordinary life.
Church and family also admired intellectual excellence, but of a practical, nonacademic sort. The church was my “safe house” in Denver. I was an indifferent academician after the sixth grade, but belonged to a “straight-A” church family whose members were dedicated participants in whatever the local or synodical church wanted. We displayed our church activities and leadership the way some families showed off their bowling trophies. The shape of this Lutheran church life has been fundamental for me. Powerful, carefully crafted sermons and intelligent “churchmanship” (as we called it then) were top priorities; my father told stories about the brilliance of Franklin Clark Fry at the dinner table, and, for the same qualities, he admired the pastor who confirmed me.
Being vigorously active in the church was the substance of our spirituality, along with cultivating a faith that was in touch with the times and not esoteric. My father considered his work in the post office to be a Christian vocation.
Except for a Missouri Synod uncle-in-law who visited several times each year and told my dad how wrong we were, there was not much polemic or concern for theological correctness in the first thirty years. The point of the Lutheran faith I grew up in was not so much to be “right,” as to be working hard and well for the church wherever one was needed and in one’s secular job. To this day, when I hear my Lutheran colleagues and friends argue aggressively about being “right” or “correct,” my stomach tightens and I sometimes feel physically ill. No one who does not understand the power of this early spiritual formation can understand my later theological work. Both Langdon Gilkey[1] and Richard Busse[2] suggest that I discovered this spirituality in Albrecht Ritschl, found it expressed in contemporary form in Teilhard de Chardin, and made it the centerpiece of The Human Factor.[3] They are both right, but this enduring motif goes back much farther in my personal history than the doctoral work on Ritschl.
Skipping ahead, chronologically, the experience of church as I have just described it in my Denver years was augmented, beginning in seminary years, by a catholic experience mediated by the emerging liturgical renewal movement. The movement was at first repugnant to me, because its proponents seemed to wield the liturgy as an instrument of a “high church correctness.” It was Robert Wilken who opened me more positively to the richness of this experience of church. It became a basic element of my spirituality and theology in the mid-1960s, when I worked and worshiped with Wilken and Richard Neuhaus in the movement that gathered around the journal Una Sancta. My trajectory has since veered from the followers of this movement, but the fact remains that the behaviorist-activist-intellectual dimension and the ecumenical-liturgical expression of the catholic traditions have melded in a curious way to be my experience of church. This was not mediated to me by the Lutheran Confessions, as it was for the disciples of Arthur Carl Piepkorn, nor was it for me a rescue from some oppressive pietism. Neither Confessions nor pietism are indigenous to who I am, nor have I been shaped by a polemic against them. For me, the ecumenical liturgy, like churchly hard work, intellectual honesty and rigor, and concern for persons, has been a means of grace.
Midland College in Nebraska took up the nurture where family and local congregation left off. Here I encountered serious Christian thinking for the first time, not in required religion courses, which made no impact on me at all, but in the philosophies of William Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. A group of five professors there took me aside (there were only 250 students at the college then) and designed for me a four-year-long honors curriculum in humanities—the payoff being a Fulbright scholarship to Germany in 1954–1955. Germany and Europe blew my mind, and convinced me that I wanted to be an academic intellectual theologian. The values of intellectual seriousness and the pluralism of ideas, peoples, cultures, and social systems were greatly intensified in the European context. After that year, being an American could never be unambiguous for me. I was not only introduced to the subsistence diet and acres of rubble still left from the destruction of the war, but also to the type of European intellectual disdain that Henry James portrays in his novels. I internalized that disdain for several years. During this year I began theological study, cutting my teeth on Paul Tillich’s Protestant Era and the first volume of the Systematic Theology and becoming in some sense a disciple forever after. The boy from Denver and Nebraska took also to Richard Strauss, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the theater of the absurd (as Tillich did, too). All of them took ambiguity to a depth that seemed right.
The Chicago Theological Lutheran Seminary at Maywood included a faculty, a peer group, and an intellectual agenda that I found almost as exciting as Tübingen. The developments that were harbingers of a new day in theology and church life included ecumenism, liturgical renewal, the American appropriation of the Luther Renaissance (Luther, not the Confessions, defined Lutheran identity for us), Lundensian theology, mature historical-critical study in the form of Bultmann and his school, and the heyday of “biblical theology” in the mode of Emil Brunner, G. Ernest Wright, Gerhard von Rad, and the Kittel Wörterbuch. Karl Barth was not on the menu of this or any other theological school I attended.
The three years of doctoral studies at the University of Chicago could be divided into three equal parts: those with Jaroslav Pelikan, my advisor, those with Bernard Meland, and those with all other faculty and departments. I count Pelikan, Meland, Joseph Sittler, and Ralph Wendell Burhoe (whom I was to meet in the later ’60s) as my most influential mentors, and in my own mind, I carry on the dialogue with them to this day.
Pelikan’s brilliance as a historian of Christianity and an academic intellectual leader is rightly celebrated, even though his provocativeness for theology is largely unappreciated. First of all, he practiced explication du texte as a method; that is to say, close reading of texts is essential and needs no justification. The interpreter brings to this reading as comprehensive an apparatus as possible, not to perform a reductionism upon the text, but in the confidence that it has something to say that is intelligible and often worth hearing.
Furthermore, perhaps in a sense presaging Umberto Eco, while eschewing his trendiness, Pelikan holds that the Christian tradition is its texts and the particular life that animated their existence. There is a sense in Pelikan’s work that true Christianity is not determined by any single normative text or set of texts, but by the totality of all its texts and the dialectics that come into play between them. Scripture is normative, not because of attributes derived from dogma, but because it is the seedbed from which all the other texts emerged. In turn, scripture’s meaning is not finished as long as subsequent texts continue to emerge from its impetus. His lectures, Jesus through the Centuries, exemplify the method in a quintessential manner. Who is the real Jesus? All the interpretations put together are the real Jesus. This is not a positivism of texts, nor is it without critical judgments, because within the texts, normative questions are raised and judgments made.
Finally, Pelikan’s interpretation of the Christian tradition, in its focus upon “what is believed, taught and confessed,” makes a clear but subtle distinction between the factors that condition a text and the constructive assertion that the text articulates in, with, and under those conditioning factors. Such articulation requires the “belief, teaching, and confession” of a substantive, constructive image of Jesus that proves viable in its context. This drives the theologian into the concreteness of the texts in which Christian faith has expressed itself, while at the same time recognizing that the identity of the faith lies in the fullness of its expressions and in the give-and-take between them, acknowledging finally that the imperative for the theologian is to believe, teach, and confess a substantive, fruitful articulation of the faith.
Devoted as he was to the classical periods of Christianity, Pelikan also teaches us that our fruitful articulations of faith are to function not only as interpretations of scripture, but also as interpretation of the cultural situations in which we live. Such a theological enterprise is truly catholic. Joseph Sittler, in a style that differs sharply, asserts essentially the same qualities for the preacher.
As I received them, Bernard Meland’s offerings coincide with Pelikan’s and Sittler’s in his insistence that the actuality of life and its forms must be given first place. The dynamics of personal and cultural life play for Meland the same role that texts do for Pelikan, and reading them closely is a prerequisite for theology.
Sittler, like Meland and Tillich, read culture like a text and attended to its message. His vivid image of Christian faith as a melody that is expressed in the context of counterpoint provided by culture grows in its appeal for me. Christian faith interprets culture, just as culture is essential for taking the measure of faith’s import. Sittler had a sense of being on the flank where the church meets the culture that is marked by skepticism, where he was the intermediary through whom church and culture could communicate. All of the mentors I have cited here share, each in his own distinctive manner, that dialectical togetherness of Christ and culture. A mentor who came later into my life, Ralph Wendell Burhoe, also recognized the dialectic, from his vantage point of liberal religion; scientific concepts elaborate traditional religion, they do not destroy it, and the function of theology is to interpret the evolutionary process that science describes with authority, but whose God-dimension it leaves inadequately illumined. Burhoe also insisted that the text—in his case the evolutionary process as described by the sciences—requires rigorous close reading.
If I have an agenda for my work on the religion/science interface, it embodies these two tenets: the dialectic in which classical Christian faith and scientific understandings interpret each other, and the painstakingly close reading of the basic texts of Christian tradition and the scientific descriptions of reality.
I have dwelt on the roots embedded in the first three decades because they are my constitution, and whatever my career has been and will become is a peculiar flowering of that tradition. I have never felt that my theological thought is my possession alone; it is one expression of what that tradition can and has become.
In my case, intentionality is an ambiguous matter. Two of my mentors are among the most disciplined workers toward a clearly defined agenda that I have ever known or heard of—Pelikan and Burhoe. I am not in that mold. More like Joseph Sittler’s, my agenda has been set by what I have been asked to do. Early inputs told me that working hard to do what the church needs in my place sets the direction of one’s intentionality. My synod ordained me explicitly to teach in a Lutheran seminary, and such teaching posts have always been my base of operation. Consequently, my theological work has always been a mirror of what the church has asked me to do.
However, the inputs from the apprentice decades have formed a gestalt of intentionality such that I can claim it as my own. I describe this gestalt in terms borrowed from figures as disparate as Langdon Gilkey and Thomas Aquinas. Thomas spoke of theology as the enterprise of relating all things to God, its distinctiveness residing not in the subjects it deals with—nature, humans, sin, evil, love, and such—but rather with the perspective from which it perceives those subjects: their relation to God. I take this to be the essence of what Gilkey means when he says that theology engages in the thematizing of contemporary experience by means of the Christian faith. Earlier in this essay, I spoke of theology’s work of articulating Christian faith as an interpretation of contemporary culture. I am impressed by the observation of many secular intellectuals that no theologian since Reinhold Niebuhr (with the possible exceptions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard John Neuhaus) has made public sense of the Christian faith for the common life and destiny of the United States.
The import of this agenda for my theological work is becoming clearer for me. Just as it is not enough to define theology’s mandate as maintaining the purity of traditional formulation, so, too, it is inadequate to define it as demonstrating the viability of the Christian tradition in whatever cultural circumstances it finds itself; it is still less adequate to relinquish, for whatever reason, the tradition of Christianity in favor of some other theological hermeneutic. What the tradition and its purity really mean can be discerned only as the tradition is itself engaged in the process of interpreting and redeeming the creation. The viability of the tradition is demonstrated in any cultural situation only in the tradition’s ability to interpret life cogently. To abandon the tradition is to abandon also the possibility of a genuinely Christian interpretation of life.
The task of theology, then, is to uncover the actual data of contemporary life, accept them in their facticity, and then, on the basis of the Christian tradition, to construct the frameworks of meaning that will provide cogent interpretations of life and help contemporary men and women discover the meaning of their lives and the ways of living that are most commensurate with that meaning. This aim drives all of my work, particularly in the religion-and-science field, but also in my attention to other facets of contemporary life.
In a recent book, The Human Factor, I said that the Christian gospel is a message about the meaning of the world. Consequently, theology is about the task of articulating that message. However, meaning cannot exist apart from intentional behavior, particularly in an era like our own in which human behavior is the decisive factor in the survival of the human species and the planet on which it exists. The centerpiece of this book’s interpretation is the concept of the created co-creator as a way of making sense of biocultural evolution and the present planetary human crisis. This is also an ethical concept, hence the emphasis on ritual and praxis.
I see in retrospect that my little 1970 book on Teilhard, as Busse suggests, does make of that thinker a model for what I believe theology should do.[4] The subtitle of the book says it all: “The Meaning of the Twentieth Century in Christian Perspective.” Teilhard provides a theological interpretation of earth’s evolution as a process of complexification in which human action of building up the earth in love is the cutting edge of the process. This interpretation of evolution serves both as an analysis of the causes and proposal for the solutions that are relevant to what he considers to be the crisis of human existence that was transpiring in his own time. The same could be said of my interpretation of evolution in The Human Factor.[5]
In Defining America (1974), Bob Benne and I, on the basis of traditional American symbols, proposed an interpretation of American life that could be an alternative to the proposals of civil religion.[6] My doctoral dissertation, Faith and the Vitalities of History (1966), approached Ritschl from the perspective of his bringing the Christian tradition to bear upon an interpretation of the rising bourgeois society of his time in terms of the kingdom of God and Christian vocation.[7] These four works, I now see for the first time, are part of a common fabric: I discovered this kind of theologizing in Ritschl, saw it elaborated in Teilhard (who could not have been more different from Ritschl!), applied it to American culture, and then to a more comprehensive range of experience that underscores scientific experience and the future of the human species and its planet.
The aim of interpreting experience in light of the Christian faith is modulated by five elaborating concerns.
The corpus of my work to date (four books and about 130 articles) shows a rough equivalence of concern for the theological tradition and for contemporary culture. This equivalence also reveals my concern for a kind of catholic theology: an action of recapitulating as much of the church’s tradition as possible within the correlative action of penetrating and recapitulating as much of contemporary culture as possible, and, as the fruit of these two actions of recapitulation, attempting to articulate the Christian faith.[8] This is the first of the elaborating concerns. In my earliest book, I described it thus, drawing imagery from the cybernetic functioning of a living organism: “In each present moment, all of the organism’s past and all of its contemporary awareness is recapitulated, eventuating in one temporal and spatial expression that is supremely relevant, in one way or another, to the environmental conditions in which the organism exists.”[9] The tradition tells us who, up to this moment, we believe God to be, and our contemporary culture is the repository of all worldly things—à la Thomas. My book on Ritschl argued that he was possessed of a catholic intention that explains his monumental researches in church history. I faulted Ritschl for a reductionist tendency that both frustrated his own catholic instincts and rendered him less useful to us today than he otherwise could have been.
The second modulation is expressed in the medieval axiom: “grace does destroy nature, but fulfills it.” Bernhard Stoeckle has reminded us that the Latin formulation in which this axiom occurs includes the idea that grace both undergirds nature and presupposes it.[10] Both renderings are necessary and also fruitful. No matter how prophetically critical of culture we may be, it is God’s creation, designed to be fulfilled in whatever way God intends. There is no junk creation.
Nowhere in my work is this axiom more evident than in Defining America. I contributed the book’s last two chapters. I interpreted the decades of the 1960s in terms of what God was telling Americans through the medium of their history. Building on Benne’s analysis of the American Dream, I argued that the Dream was both a disclosure of God’s presence for our nation and also a betrayal of that presence. Picking up Benne’s themes of the power and promise of the future, as well as dedication and sacrifice for that future and the concept of covenant, I observed that these were basic Christian themes, but that the American rendering of them was demonic. I suggested that the ways in which Americans had perverted these themes were grounds for saying that America’s evil, as surely as its good, resides in its Dream. Conclusion: Christians would work for a renewal of America, honoring its basic themes, but, through critique, clarifying the demonic within them and purifying them.
This is pretty clearly a rendering of the “grace does not destroy, but fulfills nature” theme. I took a similar tack in one of the few theological analyses of the mission of the Lutheran Church in America in terms of economic and social class, in 1977.[11] I argued that the middle-class character of the church should be viewed as the means God has given us to carry out mission, and that the middle class—under the conditions of critique and transformation, symbolized by cross and kingdom—was uniquely placed to be the servant-agent class in renovating American society.
A third modulation of my basic theme, besides catholicity and fulfillment concerns, is an emphasis on breadth of experience. I have always resisted being pigeon-holed as anyone’s disciple or as a specialist, including a specialist in religion-and-science. Even though theologians are particular creatures—and I endorse fully Sandra Harding’s notion of located knowledge—neither theology as such nor the individual churchly theologian’s vocation can be comfortable with too rigid a delimitation of interest or competence. Neither the gospel nor the reality of contemporary existence allows any such comfort.
I appreciate women theologians being called to teach feminist theology, African Americans, black theology, and Latinos, Hispanic theology. My colleague Albert Pero, however, himself African American, reminds me that just as blacks were always expected to function in cultures other than their own, white theologians should also learn such competence. At least, I would argue, theologians who work within a churchly vocation should do so. The great opportunity that African American Lutherans offered me in 1986, permitting me to be an observer at the first Conference of International Black Lutherans in Harare, was a step in educating me to Pero’s requirement. Even though the liberationist side of my thought is scarcely manifest in my published writings, it figures significantly in my teaching. I know that this criterion of comprehensiveness may be laid to my being white, male, privileged, and over sixty. If that analysis be true, and there is no reason why it should not be, then I own it openly as a characteristic of my particularity.
The fourth modulation of my basic work goes even more against the grain of conventional postmodern wisdom—that the challenge to theology requires constructive and synthetic theological articulation. I acknowledge the skepticism concerning overarching conceptual syntheses, since I agree that they surely serve the interests (in the sense of Jürgen Habermas) of the one who constructs them. Further, such constructs cannot claim to be objective or detached from the embodied situation in which they are framed. I also honor the incisiveness of theology that is carried on as narrative or as critical deconstructive sorties against lifeless abstractions and oppressive systems.
However, I also believe that the times need fresh constructive proposals that can put together large masses of inputs from many different sources. Interpreting experience calls for such efforts. The Human Factor is an attempt to provide such constructive and synthetic proposals. I try to take into account the postmodern critique of such efforts by working within the framework of Imre Lakatos’s philosophy of knowledge, namely, by formulating the proposals in discussable (“falsifiable”) form, insisting that they clearly rule out some competing proposals while affirming others, and that they be judged by the criterion of fruitfulness rather than correctness, that is, that they be instrumental for gaining new insights.
The emphasis on constructive synthetic articulation corresponds to the emphasis upon that which is believed, taught, and confessed. My basic proposal concerning human beings as God’s created co-creators is a substantive proposal for such belief and teaching. It emerges from a larger context of scientific, philosophical, and theological reflection, but it can be received as an image in its own right and taken in directions different from those dictated by its context of intellectual origin. In any case, my argument is that the concept of the created co-creator will be a useful and wholesome response to contemporary experience of many sorts.
Apart from this recent book, my most substantial foray into constructive thought was the 1976 essay, “The Foundations of Belonging in a Christian Worldview,” in which I set forth what I perceived to be the requirements for a viable worldview today and then attempted to show that the classical dogma of the Trinity could be interpreted in such a way as to fulfill those requirements for viability.[12] It is perhaps the only piece of explicit and extended metaphysical thinking that I have published.
Fifth, and finally, the enterprise of theology as interpretation of contemporary culture requires that a lot of brush be cleared before major work can begin. I am impressed with the relatively large number of intellectually difficult questions that must be dealt with before the theologian can get on with the main task. Brush-clearing has been important in my work, and I give some examples, to illustrate some of the issues that have given me difficulty over the years. In the 1960s, I realized that the theological task of interpreting human being must reckon with certain basic assumptions and interpretations that emanate from the biological and human sciences. Two essays, “Man as Nature’s Man” (1964)[13] and “Toward a New Doctrine of Man: The Relationship of Man and Nature” (1969),[14] tried simply to sort out these scientific challenges for my own thinking.
Late in the 1970s, I recognized that my thinking on the religion/science interface would have to be much more sophisticated about the problems of “is” and “ought,” since one of the major criticisms of two of my mentors, Burhoe and Teilhard, was that they were careless in dealing with these issues. My 1980 article, “Is/Ought: A Risky Relationship between Theology and Science,” surveys the philosophical literature on the issue and suggests a way through it.[15] It was a surprise to me to discover that philosophers have arrived at no real consensus on “is” and “ought”; the so-called naturalistic fallacy is far from universally recognized by philosophers working in this area. Also in 1980, I published a piece that surveyed the differing scientific perspectives on the question of “survival,” since that concept, too, was beginning to be unavoidable for my work.[16]
Further, 1980 saw publication of some brush-clearing I had done in the 1970s on the concept of sacrifice in the Bible and contemporary lifestyles.[17] Actually, I published my first reflections on sacrifice while I was a graduate student, inspired in part by Markus Barth’s spellbinding lecture on the theme, “Was Christ’s Death a Sacrifice?”[18] On a later sabbatical, I decided to work through a fuller range of biblical scholarship on the concept. This study convinced me that the Bible does not fit the stereotypes of propitiation and relinquishment that were so often raised against it by theologians and psychologists. Also under the influence of Erik Erikson’s biography of Gandhi,[19] which interpreted self-giving under the rubric of satyagraha, as well as the work of sociobiologists on altruism, I let all these disparate ideas flow together in my mind while I was at ease in Cambridge, England, in 1978–1979, where I was also listening to Charles Davis’s lectures on critical political theology.
The result is an impossibly conceived article, in which I dared the reader to follow me through the Bible, sociobiology, and neo-Marxist critique—all under the rubric of negation. When Sittler read it, he wrote me a note: “None of us knew the dimensions of the egg you were hatching in Cambridge.” Cambridge confidants Arthur Peacocke and Charlie Moule admired the effort, but thought that any attempt to resuscitate the concept of sacrifice was sheer lunacy.
This research cleared my mind, however, on what the Bible proposes as sacrifice, and I still think it is viable. Now that the feminist critique of sacrifice has taken shape, I find that I also reject the things they reject, but I do not think their critique applies to the biblical concept. Since, as Markus Barth said in the 1960s, sacrifice is the one hermeneutic for interpreting Christ’s death that all New Testament writers share,[20] and since it speaks of sacrifice as a means of God’s reconciling activity, rather than human relinquishment or sadism, we cannot jettison it casually. Furthermore, self-giving and self-investment under the dialectic of life and negation are central issues of our time, and these matters receive a lively interpretation in the biblical concept. The continuing importance of this research area is now made even more clear by the discussions set in motion by René Girard and Robert Hamerton-Kelly. This concept gathers together, in concert with the image of the created co-creator, the moral dimension of my thought. Churchly hard work is here, as are Ritschl’s sense of vocation and Teilhard’s “building the earth,” but with a Lutheran sensibility for a version of the theology of the cross.
A lumberjack cannot tackle the big trees until access through the underbrush has been achieved, and gaining that access is what much of my work amounts to. It is also what is required if an honest explication du texte—whether the tradition’s texts or culture’s texts—is to be accomplished.
Voilà! This exercise set by the editor has in itself been a journey of self-discovery for me. My style of sailing is now clearer, even to me. We face a monumental challenge of reconstructing the Christian tradition for our time—theology as interpretation of the world demands it.
61-3. The Human Factor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). ↵
61-4. The Promise of Teilhard (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1970). ↵
61-5. The Human Factor, 97–212. ↵
61-13. In The Christian Century, 16 December 1964, 1556–59. ↵
61-16. “Survival as a Human Value,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 15 (1980): 203–12. ↵
61-18. “Laetare, 1961,” The Divinity School News 28, no. 1 (1961): 5–12. ↵
61-19. Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). ↵